Lucky Peach’s New Issue: Sneak Peek

The new Lucky Peach, the inimitable quarterly food journal founded by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan, will hit newsstands on Tuesday, November 18. We asked Meehan to give us the lowdown on what readers will discover:

“Our new issue is holiday-themed, though we took a lot of leeway with which holidays made the cut. We have at least two stories about Eid, the longest story we’ve ever run (I think) about the high Voodoo holidays of Haiti, and a strange story that starts on Labor Day and gets weirder from there. We have more and better-tested recipes than we have ever published in an issue before (including a cocktail named after Martina Navratilova) and all the other bits and bobs that make the magazine what it is.

My favorite little backstory from making this issue starts like this: When we were planning our issue, [editor in chief] Chris Ying and [art director] Walter Green had the idea of doing a gingerbread house in this iterative process. First, an artist would draw the house, then an architect would do the rendering in CAD, then we’d get a pastry chef to build it, then a child dressed as a monster would destroy it. (I would like to dissuade anyone from thinking that was as ‘fun’ or as ‘easy’ as it sounded like it was going to be, though it ended up looking pretty fun on the 11 pages it takes up in the issue.)

Michael Laiskonis’s Miami-style gingerbread house. (Photo: Davide Luciano)

We knew we needed some kind of ninja assassin in the pastry chef department, because edible structural pastry is not a craft project for the weak of heart. The formidable Michael Laiskonis—formerly of Le Bernardin, now at ICE [Institute of Culinary Education]—signed up for the job, bless his heart. Without any guiding direction from us, artist Scott Teplin drew a house that was rather clearly a Miami-style drug mansion. We took the idea and ran with it. Ying’s little brother, an architecture student, rendered it. And then it was on Laiskonis to build this rococo/garish structure, which he did with no complaints, much to his credit.

I showed up for the photo shoot with my 4-year-old daughter and her friend, and they got dressed as cops to ‘bust’ the cocaine mansion. It was my first time meeting Laiskonis in person. I thanked him and apologized to him in equal measure, and asked him if it was the dumbest thing he’d been asked to do this year—or ever in his career. He cracked a smile and told me he’d never even made a gingerbread house before, but that he was happy to do it for Lucky Peach. I’m not really sure whether that’s because no one else would ask him to do something this stupid or because he likes the magazine, but I settled on the latter and sat with him as we watched my daughter huff blue Nerds out of a dollhouse-sized infinity pool and smash his hours of work into a smear of royal icing and a heap of gingerbread crumbs.”

Check out Lucky Peach’s Tumblr for subscription info and random musings from its editors.

For more on the Lucky Peach crew:
Why You Might Actually Want to Spend $20 on a Magazine
Peter Meehan Talks About What Takes a Meal from Good to Great
David Chang in Praise of Rotting Food